I have before me a copy of Neil Postman's The End of Education. My
original intent was to review this, Postman's most recent publication, in
isolation, referring only superficially, if at all, to his many other books.
However, I now realize that such an approach would be a disservice to Postman;
for if I have learned one thing from my reading of Postman over the years, it
is that he values above all continuity and context over the discontinuity and
fragmentation which he sees as endemic of our modern technological culture or
"Technocracy." Indeed, I believe it would also be a disservice to the reader if
I were to limit my comments to this book--not because the book fails to
adequately represent Postman's philosophy but precisely because it does.
The End of Education offers a new perspective on ideas and viewpoints
set forth in his other books--not just in those which focus on education, such
as Teaching as a Subversive Activity (co-authored with Charles
Weingartner in 1969) and Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979);
but also in publications on media (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985),
technology (Technopoly, 1992), language (Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk,
1976), and social history (The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982). In
fact, during his thirty years as "an affectionate critic of American
prejudices, tastes, and neuroses" (Postman, 1995, p. 62), Postman has written
approximately 20 books which, though apparently addressing diverse topics, in
fact centre on a core of recurring themes dealing with the intersection of
technology, language, and education.

It would therefore be a mistake to classify Postman's End of Education
as one of his "books about education" as opposed to one of his "books about
media and technology." The reader who is intent on such categories will surely
be less inclined to perceive the larger picture and to understand the deeply
serious social and moral intent of Postman's work. Educator, media theorist,
and communications expert he may be; but these specialties are all subsumed in
the larger pursuit of "media ecology," the study of information environments as
a whole in order "to understand how technologies and techniques of
communication control the form, quantity, speed, distribution, and direction of
information; and how, in turn, such information configurations or biases affect people's
perceptions, values, and attitudes" (Postman, 1979, p. 186). The media
ecologist argues, for example, that the emergence of the printing press did not
simply result in the same fifteenth century society with the addition of a new
machine, but rather in a new society entirely, characterized by new values and
understandings, new habits and habits of mind. All of Postman's books are, in
one way or another, a study of media ecology, of the way in which we are shaped
by our own creations.

As a media ecologist, Postman sees the telegraph and photograph as the
catalysts of a profound change which would, a century after their invention,
create a dangerous imbalance in the information environment. The introduction
of telegraphy into typographic culture disrupted its ecology by creating the
idea of "context-free information" (Postman, 1992, p. 67) which had no
necessary utility or context; and soon after, with the invention of
photography, the reason, logic, and continuity characteristic of expository
language began to be sublimated to the immediacy and instancy of the visual
image:

As the twentieth century began, the amount of information available through
words and pictures grew exponentially. With telegraphy and photography leading
the way, a new definition of information came into being. Here was information
that rejected the necessity of interconnectedness, proceeded without context,
argued for instancy against historical continuity, and offered fascination in
place of complexity and coherence. (Postman, 1992, p. 69)

Television has exacerbated this ecological imbalance, "raising the interplay
of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection" (Postman, 1985,
p. 78). Directing not only what we know, but how we know it (Postman calls TV
the "First Curriculum"), television packages all information in entertaining,
contextless fragments which we receive mindlessly. If we need proof that this
is so, Postman offers advertisements, once comprised of words intended to
appeal to the understanding of a rational public, which now consist largely of
images intended to manipulate their passions; political campaigns, in which a
candidate's success now has more to do with his hairstyle than his political
beliefs; and news shows, which are designed to entertain more than inform, and
which give prominence to highly visual and haptic events. Achieving its zenith
in television, the preeminence of visual imagery "has created an ecological
problem, and a dangerous one":

We have a generation being raised in an information environment that, on one
hand, stresses visual imagery, discontinuity, immediacy, and alogicality. It is
antihistorical, antiscientific, anticonceptual, antirational. On the other
hand, the context within which this occurs is a kind of religious or
philosophic bias toward the supreme authority of technicalization. What this
means is that as we lose confidence and competence in our ability to think and
judge, we willingly transfer these functions to machines. Whereas our machinery
was once thought of as an `extension of man,' man now becomes an `extension of
machinery.' (Postman, 1979, p. 100)

Granted, Postman's contention as a media ecologist that "Technological change
is not additive; it is ecological" (Postman, 1995, p. 192) is not new. He is
the first to acknowledge that a similar conclusion has been drawn over the
years by many others, including the likes of Plato, Louis Mumford, Jacques
Ellul, Harold Adams Innis, and, of course, Marshall McLuhan. But I might as
well clear the air on this score once and for all: while Postman owes much to
the ideas of McLuhan, he is equally indebted to those of Edward Sapir, Sigmund
Freud, Aldous Huxley, Northrop Frye, Norbert Wiener, Noam Chomsky, John Dewey,
Alfred Korzybski, I.A. Richards, and a host of others; and he is certainly much
more than a mere McLuhan "wannabe." Where McLuhan is an observer of culture,
maintaining an objective stance, Postman is a media ecologist driven by a
profound moral imperative to play a role in maintaining--or perhaps more
accurately, regaining--social balance. As a media ecologist, Postman rejects
McLuhan's deliberately neutral commentary on the emergence of a new global
village, and decries instead what he sees to be the demise of American culture,
offering where he can solutions and suggestions for halting the erosion of a
literate tradition. And, despite his enormous respect for McLuhan's ideas, he
also tacitly condemns McLuhan's use of sensational fragments, or "probes," as a
method of "getting a hearing" with the public (Postman, 1969, p. 7). Here,
perhaps, is the key to the essential difference between the two men: while both
understand that "the medium is the message," that form is content, they differ
greatly in what they do with that knowledge. McLuhan used his understanding of
how media function to tailor his message to media's requirements. Postman on
the other hand deliberately resists pressures to reduce his ideas to
contextless fragments, offering instead fully articulated, lucid arguments
requiring readers to follow a number of carefully presented premises to a
logical conclusion. And while Postman is well aware that his methodology and
his sometimes curmudgeonly arch-conservatism prevent him from attracting quite
so many followers as the "Oracle of the Electronic Age," it is part of his
moral imperative as a media ecologist to champion the values of tradition,
whether in exposition or education.

For adherence to the traditional values of a typographic culture is the crux
of Postman's philosophy. Beginning in particular with Teaching as a
Conserving Activity and continuing into The End of Education,
Postman articulates a serious argument that, given the erosion of our culture
by technology, the role of the school should not be to maintain pace with
change but rather to provide an oasis of tradition and quietude from which to
observe the technological frenzy that is modern society: "Without at least a
reminiscence of continuity and tradition, without a place to stand from which
to observe change, without a counterargument to the overwhelming thesis of
change, we can easily be swept away--in fact, are being swept away" (Postman,
1979, p. 21). Postman rejects the frantic efforts of educators who
insist that the school must keep pace with social change, and argues that most
of the efforts made on that behalf are mere "educational engineering" based on
a shallow educational philosophy: that students should be made "job ready." The
deliberately ambiguous title of his most recent book surely contains within it
an ironic reference to those, like Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society,
1970) and Lewis Perelman (School's Out, 1992), who argue against
compulsory education on the grounds that the school and traditional book
learning have no relevance in today's high-tech, information rich culture.
Postman contends that school as we know it is enormously valuable precisely
because of its lack of relevance:

As it is mostly conducted even in the present age, school is one of our few
remaining information systems firmly organized around preelectronic patterns of
communication. School is old times and old biases. For that reason, it is more
valuable to us than most people realize, but, in any case, provides a clear
contrast to the newer system of perception and thought that television
represents. By putting television and school side by side, we can see where we
are going and what we are leaving, which is exactly what we need to know.
(Postman, 1979, p. 47-48)

For Postman, adherence to tradition, then, is not a Luddite stance. He is well
aware that "We gain nothing but chaos by banning or breaking our machines"
(Postman, 1979, p. 101). But as a media ecologist, he argues that tradition is
of fundamental importance because it provides the means to an objective,
balanced perspective which is our only defense against unmitigated
technological advancement. Only through critical insight (what Postman called
"crap detecting" in Teaching as a Subversive Activity), can we hope to
understand how new technologies are shaping our lives and thereby control their
effects--disastrous effects which could, without careful stewardship, lead to
the demise of American culture. If school is to provide students with critical
insight into their culture--if it is to counter the "dull and even stupid
awareness" (Postman, 1992, p. 20), the sleepwalking attitude, which currently
prevails--then it must do so by providing a neutral forum in which "you [are]
positioned some distance away from the influences of your own times" rather
than being "held captive in the midst of things" (Postman, 1979, p. 185). True
"technology education," as Postman would have it taught, is not instruction on
basic programming and the like, but rather on how computers, television, and
other technologies are changing the way we think and act:

As I see it, the subject is mainly about how television and movie cameras,
Xerox machines, and computers reorder our psychic habits, our social relations,
our political ideas, and our moral sensibilities. It is about how the meanings
of information and education change as new technologies intrude upon a culture,
how the meanings of truth, law, and intelligence differ among oral cultures,
writing cultures, printing cultures, electronic cultures. Technology education
is not a technical subject. It is a branch of the humanities. (Postman, 1995,
p. 191)

Similarly, Postman contends that instruction in language (specifically,
semantics, the study of the relationship of language to reality) must play a
crucial role in helping students develop the critical insight which is our best
defense against the unmitigated development of new technologies. The study of
semantics offers a form of meta-education, in which students learn not just
about a subject but about the assumptions and metaphors of which its language
is comprised: "[Semantics] helps students to reflect on the sense and truth of
what they are writing and of what they are asked to read. It teaches them to
discover the underlying assumptions of what they are told. It emphasizes the
manifold ways in which language can distort reality" (Postman, 1992, p. 195).
Rather than being drilled on the use of metaphor in a poem, students should be
given the opportunity to learn the real power of language to create reality:
"how metaphors control what we say, and to what extent what we say controls
what we see" (Postman, 1995, p. 186).

In our modern day "Technopoly," then--this barren technological desert,
lacking any underlying moral wellspring--a school based on traditional values
not only provides an oasis from which to view new technologies, but it also
provides sustenance that the arid Technocracy cannot provide. As Postman sees
it, school can only "help conserve that which is both necessary to a humane
survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture" (Postman, 1979,
p. 25) if it offers a vision of something different than that culture. That vision
is contained in what he calls a "narrative" or "god."

In Technopoly, Postman defines a narrative as "a story of human history
that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for
the future. It is a story whose principles help a culture to organize its
institutions, to develop ideals, and to find authority for its actions"
(Postman, 1992, p. 172). Technopoly deals largely with the way in which
technology has deprived us of our narratives, our coherent view of the world
and its meaning, and therefore of our moral underpinnings. In The End of
Education, Postman continues the theme, emphasizing the need for narratives
in education lest the school lose its meaning and function:

Here, I will say only that the idea of public education depends absolutely on
the existence of shared narratives and the exclusion of narratives that
lead to alienation and divisiveness. What makes public schools public is not so
much that the schools have common goals but that the students have common gods.
The reason for this is that public education does not serve a public. It
creates a public. . . . The question is, What kind of public does it
create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless,
directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with
confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The
answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with
testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other
details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two
things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such
narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling. (Postman, 1995, p.
17-18)

The End of Education begins with a description of several narratives
that have failed. For example, the narrative of Economic Utility, the idea that
"the purpose of schooling is to prepare children for competent entry into the
economic life of a community" (Postman, 1995, p. 27), has failed in light of
growing evidence that, despite their education, graduating students are more
likely to land a McJob than a well-paying, challenging position. And Postman
contends that the narrative of Technology, based on a sort of hyper-reaction to
the inevitability of new technologies, is a "false god" which inhibits the
learning of social skills and which, used as an engineering solution to the
teaching of subjects, ultimately fosters the kind of sleepwalking attitude to
technology which Postman so deplores.

In accordance with the mandate of the media ecologist to find solutions,
Postman goes on to offer "five narratives that, singly and in concert, contain
sufficient resonance and power to be taken seriously as reasons for schooling.
They offer, I believe, moral guidance, a sense of continuity, explanations of
the past, clarity to the present, hope for the future" (Postman, 1995, p.
61-62). Used as the scaffolding upon which to build a curriculum, narratives
such as the ascent of humanity, the American experiment, and the use of
language to create the world will, he suggests, give school a meaning that it
currently lacks and help counter rampant information glut and discontinuity.
These narratives all continue themes from Postman's previous books and stress
the notions of continuity, rationality, and human dignity which are central
tenets of Postman's philosophy.

Only by looking at Postman's latest book in the context of his other writings
is it possible to gain a full understanding of its implications. Postman is not
just trying to save the schools by finding a inclusive narrative upon which to
base all learning; he is trying to save public education because he believes it
is the only means by which American culture can be preserved from the rampages
of uncontrolled technological development. Ultimately, it is not the end of
education that he is concerned about, but the demise of culture and
"civilité."

Nevertheless, it would be a gross inaccuracy to accuse Postman of cynicism and
doom-saying; for Postman writes The End of Education and all of his
books as a romantic, one who maintains "a belief in the improvability of the
human condition through education" (Postman, 1969, p. xiii), a faith "that
despite some of the more debilitating teachings of culture itself, something
can be done in school that will alter the lenses through which one sees the
world" (Postman, 1995, p. x). Examining The End of Education within the
context of the Postman canon makes it clear that this latest publication is a
new lesson in a curriculum that Postman has been delivering for many years to
those who will listen, a course of study which promotes concepts of knowledge
and ways of knowing which include detachment, objectivity, analysis, and
criticism; which challenges us to cast a critical gaze upon our technologies
and their underlying meanings, and to examine how language and metaphor shape
our lives; which invites us to appreciate and cultivate the values of logical
thought and historical understanding; and, finally, which implores us to "enter
the conversation with enthusiasm and resolve" (Postman, 1995, p. 91). Only an
optimist could continue delivering such a course of study for thirty years.

References

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in
the age of show business. New York: Viking Penguin Inc.

Postman, N. (1995). The end of education: Redefining the value of
school. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.